Corporate private foundations with vast financial resources are taking on an increasingly proactive and influential role in shaping educational aims, practices, and institutions around the world (Srivastava & Oh, 2010; Ball and Olmedo, 2011; Lubienski et al. 2022; Parreira de Amaral et al. 2019). While the concrete involvement of foundations reflects the historical specificities of different contexts, the increasing entanglement of private foundations in public education and state schooling has been interpreted as reflecting a broad shift in the work of foundations toward new forms of “hands-on” or “new” philanthropy in which foundations move from a contributory to a disruptive role (Horvath & Powell, 2016; Wilson, 2014). Framed in terms of educational governance and politics, this shift places major pressure on the conceptual and practical boundaries of conventional democratic control, delegations of responsibility, and framings of legitimacy.   

The shifting grounds for articulating and enacting democratic control and legitimacy is especially salient in the context of European education and the region’s historical forms of welfare governance. While private foundations in the US and other contexts are, by now, an established (if controversial) part of educational governance, recent scholarship emerging across Europe points to important problematics regarding the effects of current philanthropic practices on the conventional divisions of power and democratic practices of accountability characteristic of European welfare states (Rasmussen, 2022; Avelar & Ball, 2019). Such effects pose a significant challenge to the notion of legitimacy as grounded in a chain of delegation, accountability, and trust, where voters authorize politicians to make decisions – on the priorities of public education, for example – and politicians then delegate the responsibility for implementing policies to civil servants (Strøm 2000). This is obviously different when it comes to private foundations: While foundations are legal actors attributed a status as charitable organizations by the political system, they do not themselves hold a role in the processes that make up the political system.

In this paper, we set out to explore empirical changes and reconfigurations of power and legitimacy in educational governance as corporate private foundations take on a proactive label of “change-makers” in public education. Situating our work within the historical context of the Danish welfare state, we set out to explore how legitimacy in public education is (re)constructed and altered through the practices of “new philanthropy” as a set of practices marked by increasing amounts of money, extended public-private partnerships, and new forms of educational knowledge production. We ask: How do corporate private foundations describe their responsibility for the change they aim at? And through what kind of practices are their investments in systematic change articulated and implemented?

In the paper, we respond to these questions through a case-based analyses focused on situating the practices of the two largest Danish foundations currently involved in the education sector: The Lego Foundation and the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Drawing on theoretical approaches that can help approach reconfigurations of power and control in educational practices (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Brøgger, 2018; Deleuze, 1992; Foucault, 1977; Powell & Menendian, 2011), we are interested in extrapolating the broader historical and governmental dynamics at play in how foundations shape ideas of legitimacy by actively transgressing conventional governance arrangements and hierarchies. Theoretically, this includes perspectives that open to discuss the soft power of seduction and affectivity (Dernikos et al., 2020) as important factors when it comes to understanding new philanthropic practices. Through in-depth case analyses, the paper highlights the performative effects of enacting new philanthropy in relation to three interrelated practices: 1) new constructions of actors, 2) emerging forms of affective control, and 3) new forms of knowledge production.

In this paper we address the practices of private foundations in the field of school and education. With a particular interest in questions of governance and legitimization in European contexts shaped by a strong tradition for welfare governance and public educational values, we build our problematization on a selective case study of two recent projects launched within the Danish educational field by private foundations. These are, respectively, the Playful Learning initiative by the Lego Foundation and the LIFE project developed by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Through an extrapolative reading of the two projects, the paper aims to hypothesize novel tendencies and provocations in the practices of private foundations that point to radical changes in the established order of how educational governance and pedagogical development are to take form. Concretely, the paper builds on a gathering of empirical material generated through 2023 and Spring 2024 involving interviews, observations, website data, promotional material, and a survey of actors engaged in or affected by the increasingly large and long partnerships that characterize the two foundations.

The paper’s findings highlight three interrelated practices emerging through our analyses of new philanthropy in Denmark with implications for the European educational research field. First, we show how foundations are involved in new constructions of actors, i.e. how they connect with, create expectations for, and partner with actors (Brunsson & Sahlin 2000). Building on examples from the LEGO Foundation and Novo Nordisk Foundation, we question how different actors and their conditions of possibility are themselves performatively configured through the discursive-material work of foundations. This involves for instance appointing and connecting with relevant partners, naming and appointing ambassadors, creating career paths for professional teacher. Second, we explore emerging forms of control found in the increasingly proactive and affective practices of foundations. Drawing on different theorizations of power and control in contemporary forms of governance (Deleuze 1992; Dernikos 2020; Rose & Miller, 2010; Foucault, 1991; Thorup, 2013), we question how the current practices of the two foundations indicate a move away from practices of goal-setting, evaluation, and institutionalised discipline toward a broad valuation of innovation and potentiality that transgress the established national-political frameworks of education policy. This shift, we suggest, opens possibilities for both scaling up through conceptual control and scaling down through new forms of modularization. Third, we examine how the two foundations draw on different sources of legitimacy in their positioning as changemakers that seek to look further and deeper than conventional forms of educational governance. By comparing the work of the Lego and Novo Nordisk foundations with other foundations involved in shaping public education, we discuss the implications of the two foundations’ practices as knowledge producers and brokers that seek to generate futures and solutions rather than situate their contributions within or as compensations for established political goals.

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